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Prince: App stores and Facebook damaged the open web

Matthew Prince · Cloudflare CEO: We're Ready To Block Millions of Websites From AI — With Matthew Prince · Sep 2, 2026 · at 6:44

Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince argues that walled gardens drained vibrancy away from the open web.

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“And the app store in some ways was an enormous threat to the web. Like it took people away from the web. It was probably one of the biggest, between it and Facebook were like the two biggest forces that really made the web less interesting.”

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More from Matthew Prince

Assertion Not checkable as stated
Prince: Earning traffic from OpenAI is 750x harder than Google historically
“In OpenAI's case, it's 750 times harder to get traffic than it was from Google just 10, 10, 10 years ago. In the case of something like Anthropic, it's 30,000 times more, more difficult to get that traffic.”
Matthew Prince Aug 13, 2025 ▶ 4:02 Can We Save The Web From AI? — With Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince
Assertion Supported
Prince: Anthropic's 60,000-to-1 crawl-to-click ratio means publishers are completely dead
“I think they're dead at 250 or 1500 to one that we're seeing with OpenAI and completely dead at 60,000 to one that we're seeing with something like Anthropic.”
Matthew Prince Aug 13, 2025 ▶ 8:28 Can We Save The Web From AI? — With Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince
Disclosure
Prince: Cloudflare will block Google scrapers for publishers starting in September
“And what we have said at cloudflare is that by mid September, we're gonna treat Google the same way on. If you have an, you know, ads, if you're a business that's ad supported, subscription supported, then we're going to restrict Google from being able to acce…”
Matthew Prince Sep 2, 2026 ▶ 30:05 Cloudflare CEO: We're Ready To Block Millions of Websites From AI — With Matthew Prince
Disclosure
Cloudflare announces hard-blocking AI crawlers unless they pay creators
“And then just today on July first, we announced that we are hard blocking the AI crawlers unless they will actually compensate Content creators for the content that they're creating.”
Matthew Prince Aug 13, 2025 ▶ 4:42 Can We Save The Web From AI? — With Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince
Assertion Supported
Prince: Automated web traffic surpassed human traffic for first time in 2026
“In May of 2026, you won't believe it, but we now see that automated traffic is past human traffic for the first time in the history of the internet.”
Matthew Prince Sep 2, 2026 ▶ 2:16 Cloudflare CEO: We're Ready To Block Millions of Websites From AI — With Matthew Prince
Prediction Held up
Prince: Google Paying Publishers for AI Scraping Is Inevitable
“I don't know if they'll pay up before the deadline, but I think it's inevitable that they'll pay up. Because again, I think that they need the content and they understand fundamentally that journalists and content creators and academics deserve to eat.”
Matthew Prince Sep 2, 2026 ▶ 36:31 Cloudflare CEO: We're Ready To Block Millions of Websites From AI — With Matthew Prince
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